The Old Charges of Freemasonry"There exists a collection of documents which has been called up as evidence
both for the operative and non-operative origins of Freemasonry. Described by
Anderson as the Gothic Constitutions, and now known collectively as the
Old Charges, some 127 versions have been traced of which 113 are still
in existence....All have a common form: The Wood manuscript, written in 1610 "traces the history of the Order from
two
pillars that were found after Noah's Flood, none made of a marble that would
not burn with fire, the other made of a substance known in Masonic legends as
Laterus, which would not dissolve, sink or drown in any water. One of these
pillars was found and upon it were inscribed the secrets of the sciences from
which the Sumerians developed a moral code that passed to the Egyptians through
the Sumerian Abraham and his wife Sarah. The script goes on to describe
Euclid
teaching geometry to the Egyptians, from whom the Israelites took it to
Jerusalem, which resulted in the building of King Solomon's Temple." "A record of the society written in the reign of Edward IV, said to have been in the possession of the famous Elias Ashmole, founder of the Museum at Oxford, and which was unfortunately destroyed, with other papers on the subject of Masonry, at the Revolution, gives the following account of the state of Masonry at this period:
Preston's accounts of the history of Masonry in England, beginning with the Druids and Romans, are based on the mythical history included in Anderson's Constitutions (1773) and his own 1776 Appendix. "In the west of England there is a magnificent chain of cathedrals without
parallel elsewhere: Exeter, Wells, Gloucester, Worcestershire and Hereford, as
well asmany abbeys and castles, on which building was carried out almost
continuously during the five centuries before A.D. 1500." "During the reign of Henry II, the Grand Master of the
Knights
Templars superintended the Masons, and employed them in building their
Temple in Fleet-street, A.D. 1155. Masonry continued under the patronage of this
Order till the year 1199, when John succeeded his brother Richard in the crown
of England." "The term freemason appears as early as 1375 in the records of
the city of London. It referred to working masons who were permitted to travel
the country at a time when the feudal system shackled most peasants closely to
the land. Unlike the members of other crafts of the time - smiths or tanners for
example - the masons gathered in large groups to work on majestic, glorious
projects, moving from one finished castle or cathedral to the planning and
building of the next. For mutual protection, education, and training, the masons
bound themselves together into a local lodge - the building, put up at a
construction site, where workmen could eat and rest. Eventually, a lodge came to
signify a group of masons based in a particular locality." "At the beginning of the reign of Henry VI, in 1425, a ban was placed on
holding them [annual assemblies of masons] on the ground that they contravened
the Statutes of Labourers. The masons protested that they were as loyal and
law-abiding as other trades and objected to being singled out for attack. Condor
(The Hole Craft and Fellowship of Masons, p.77) observes that 'we do
not hear of this Act being put into force' and he gives high legal opinion that
it was repealed in 1562. It may be a coincidence but it was about this time that
the earliest extant post-reformation versions of the Old Charges appeared." "A record in the reign of Edward IV runs thus:
"It has been demonstrated that freemason - in an operative context - is a
contraction of 'freestone mason'....The earliest printed use so far traced comes
in The Pilgrimage of Perfection - usually attributed to William Bonde -
printed in 1536 by Wynkyn de Worde."
"Guilds of mason were common, and can be found emerging in Scotland (where
guilds were generally known as incorporations) in the late Middle Ages." "...The Masons were countenanced and protected in Scotland by King James I.
After his return from captivity, he became the patron of the learned, and a
zealous encourager of Masonry. The Scottish records relate, that he honored the
lodges with his royal presence; that he settled a yearly revenue of four pounds
Scots, (an English noble,) to be paid by every Master-Mason in Scotland, to a
Grand Master, chosen by the Grand Lodge, and approved by the crown, one nobly
born, or an eminent clergyman, who had his deputies in cities and counties, and
every new brother at entrance paid him also a fee. His office empowered him to
regulate in the fraternity what should not come under the cognizance of
law-courts." "In Scotland such lodges [established for long-term site building activity],
under burgh control, can be traced in Aberdeen and Dundee in the late fifteenth
and early sixteen centuries. But they appear to have declined or disappeared
entirely shortly before or after the Reformation of 1560 brought a new
protestant church to Scotland."
(2) A Brother to Pirates and Corsairs Concerning stonemasons in the Middle Ages, "their vocabulary and most likely
their ability for abstract thought must have been very limited indeed. Travel
for all but the most highly skilled master masons was a rare event so secret
signs, grips and passwords would not be of much value; end even if they did
travel from one building construction to another why would they need secret
means of recognition?" "A final check at Oxford's Bodleian, one of the great libraries of the world,
and I finally felt absolutely secure in stating that Freemasonry did not evolve
from the medieval guilds of stonemasons in Britain because it would appear that
there were no medieval guilds of stonemasons in Britain." Masonic expressions that Robinson said were derived from French language roots include:
The surviving members of the Knights Templars in England would have had to flee or hide to escape persecution and death. "...We can find no fourteenth century precedent for any organization that
consistently referred to fellow members as brothers [frere Macon], except for
the various religious orders, which, of course, included the
Knights of the Temple."
"All through the oaths and the Old Charges we see emerging a mutual aid and
protection society, protecting men who could die if caught."
Another Old Charge "says that a visitor brother is not to go 'into the town'
unless accompanied by a local brother who can 'witness' for him (i.e., vouch for
him to the local authorities, who had the right to arrest strangers of unknown
business in the town)." "We can now be certain, without any shadow of doubt, that the staring place
for Freemasonry was the construction of
Rosslyn Chapel in the mid-fifteenth century; later historical developments
confirm this view because the St Clair family of Rosslyn became the hereditary
Grand Masters of the Crafts and Guilds and Orders of Scotland, and later held
the post of the Master of Masons of Scotland until the late 1700s." William St Clair designed and built Rosslyn Chapel using the plans of Solomon's Temple, and incorporating many Templar and Masonic motifs. Knight and Lomas speculate that the Chapel also contained a copy of the vaults at Solomon's Temple and its hidden treasure. "William St Clair had an obvious problem with security; the masons building
his scroll shrine had to know the layout of the underground vault network and
they knew that this strange building was to house something of great value.
Origins of Modern Freemasonry(1) The Acception"King James VI of Scotland (also later James I of England) was the only child
of Mary Queen of Scots and the first king to rule both England and Scotland. He
was also the first king known to be a Freemason, being initiated into the Lodge
of Scots and Perth in 1601 at the age of thirty five." "The man who more than anyone else deserves the title of creator of modern
Feemasonry was William Schaw. The younger son of a laird
(landowner) with close connections with the court, Schaw developed a strong
interest in architecture and in 1583 was appointed master of works by King James
VI of Scotland." "Schaw started this major project on 28 December 1598 when he issued 'The
statues and ordinances to be observed by all the master maissouns within this
realme,' signing himself as 'the General Warden of the said craft'." "As general warden and master of works Schaw issued two codes of statutes, in
1598 and 1599. In these he laid down regulations for the organization and
practice of the mason craft through a system of 'lodges'." "Scotland's early freemasons, it would appear, probably kept specific
religious practices out of their lodges as to do otherwise would have been to
confront the church with an attack on its monopoly of religion but as a later
date the morality without religious worship of the lodges made freemasonry
attractive to those developing tolerant or deistic attitudes." Sir Francis Bacon, who became Solicitor-General under fellow Freemason James
I of England, was a champion of inductive reasoning and has been described as
"the father of modern science". "In Scotland there is a wealth of evidence for the existence of operative
lodges organized on a geographical basis and backed up by statue law. From the
early 1600s there are also many documented examples of the introduction of
non-operatives into Scottish operative lodges. There is not, however, any
evidence that these non-operative members in any way altered the nature or
workings of Scottish operative lodges until very late in the seventeenth
century, by which time accepted Masonry was well established in England. All the
evidence suggests that accepted Masonry emerged in England and
spread from there to Scotland." "By the seventeenth century, as the number and stature of masons grew, some
lodges had begun to admit honorary members who were not stoneworkers. The London
Masons' Company founded the Acception, a parallel organization
for that purpose, in 1619. It took in as 'accepted Masons' men who did not
belong to the company but who were willing to pay double the initiation fee." "...Elias Ashmole was one of the first recorded inductees into the
Freemasons, but the actual first recorded induction was Dr. Robert Moray in
Edinburgh in 1641. Both Ashmole and Moray were founding members of the British
Royal Society." Ashmole was an admirer of the Knights Templars. Even after their trial, the Templars were
"Masonry became so fashionable that as the seventeenth century progressed the
'acceptance' (the collective term for non-stonemasons) became the majority in
the masonic Lodges. For example, in 1670, the Aberdeen Lodge had thirty-nine
'accepted' members while only ten remained 'operative' masons."
"We can be sure that the Royal society germinated from the hothouse of
thinking that was released by Bacon's definition of the
Second Degree of Freemasonry well before people such as
Ashmole and Wilkins pierced it all back together after the traumas of the
Civil War." "We date the formation [of the British Royal Society] earlier than was previously thought. There was a series of meetings in England in 1640. This is an important year because it was the beginning of the Long Parliament. Comenius and Samuel Hartlib were involved. Comenius was originally from Bohemia, and was in the Palatinate during the fateful Rosicrucian years, along with the Englishman Samuel Hartlib, with whom he was in close contact. With the defeat of the Palatinate they both, through different routes, end up in England. When the Long Parliament started, there was another outburst of ecstatic literature [following the dissemination of Rosecrucian pamphlets]. One piece written by Hartlib in 1640, "A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria," is a utopian work addressed to the attention of the Long Parliament. A year later, Comenius wrote 'The Way of Light'. They call for an 'Invisible College', which is a Rosicrucian code name." "Now the plot thickens. In 1645, a meeting takes place for a discussion of
the natural sciences. Present at the meeting are Mr. Theodore Haak from the
Palatinate and Dr. John Wilkins, who at the time was the chaplain to the elector
of Palatine. Wilkins was the man behind the Oxford meetings which become, in
1660, the British Royal Society. Another founder of the Royal Society was
Robert Boyle, who in letters in 1646, refers to, again, an invisible
college. John Wilkins writes a book in 1648 called Mathematical Magic,
in which he explicitly mentions the Rosy Cross and pays homage to occultists
Robert Fludd and John Dee. "Men of science in London, Oxford, and Cambridge met in secret in what has
been termed an 'invisible college', which now appears to have existed in secret
Masonic lodges in those areas. Their first secret meeting was held in 1645, just
three years after the death of Galileo. By 1660, the group felt secure enough in
the apparently Protestant reign of Charles II to petition the crown for a royal
charter, which was granted in 1662. The name they chose was The Royal Society of
London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge..." "While there are many stories about the ancient origins of the Freemasons,
here is an announcement for one of their meetings in 1676: 'To give notice that
the Modern Green-ribboned Cabal, together with the ancient brotherhood of the
Rosy Cross: the Hermetic Adepti and the company of Accepted Masons....' It is
interesting to note how clear the tradition is." "When Freemasonry came public in 1717...it appeared that the Royal Society
was virtually a Masonic subsidiary, with almost every member and every founding
member of the Royal Society a Freemason."
(3) The New Grand Lodge System "The new Grand Lodge system established at the Goose and Gridiron Alehouse in
1717 consisted at first of only one level (degree) of initiation. Within five
years of the Lodge's founding, two additional degrees were added so that the
system consisted of three steps:
Entered Apprentice,
Fellow Craft and
Master Mason. These steps are
commonly called the 'Blue Degrees' because the color blue is
symbolically important in them." Like the
cords worn by the Templars, "each
Masonic Blue Lodge initiation
requires the
use of a cord, or rather a 'cabletow'." "We believe that the current content of the three degrees of Craft
Freemasonry was already present in just two degrees prior to Schaw's
reorganization that inserted an extra level of speculative masonry in between
Entered Apprentice and Master Mason (which was originally known as the Master's
Part). This new degree was introduced and designated the Fellow Craft, derived
we think from the fact that these masons were not workers in stone but workers
in the 'fellow craft' of speculative masonry. We are now sure that this degree
was a development of the Mark Mason degree (and not the other way around as most
Masons believe)." The "Scottish operative lodges began in the seventeenth century to admit
non-operative members as accepted or gentleman masons
and that by the early eighteenth century in some lodges the accepted or
gentleman masons had gained the ascendancy: those lodges became, in turn
speculative lodges, whilst others continued their purely operative nature. The
speculative lodges eventually combined to form the Grand Lodge of Scotland in
1736." "The 'craft' of Freemasonry was one of the more extraordinary manifestations
of the Age of Reason, typical of its time not only because it stood for
rationalism, deism, and benevolence, but also because of the ambiguity which
turned one side of its affairs from rationality to mystery. It was in one way an
emanation of that most British of institutions, the club. It took shape during
the first three decades of the eighteenth century, and reflected the tolerance
and the confidence of Hanoverian England. Its ideology, founded on the metaphors
of the architecture of the universe and the building of the Temple, was deist
and non-confessional. The Freemason obliged himself to submit to the civil
power, whose benevolent nature was assumed; this optimism was typical of British
Whig self-assurance. The Mason asserted a non-clerical ethos, and a middlebrow
and commonsensical attitude to life. He claimed to be instructed and
enlightened, but he did not set up to be learned; this distinguished his society
from those of the contemporary 'academies'." "Toward the end of the 1730s, there were lodges in Belgium, Russia, Italy,
Germany, and Switzerland. But it seemed to have a special appeal in France,
partly because of the rage then current there for all things British. In 1735,
there five Masonic lodges in Paris; by 1742, the number was twenty-two. Some
forty-five years later, on the eve of the French Revolution, there were perhaps
100,000 Masons in France." "By 1730 when the Roman Catholic Duke of Norfolk was installed (prior to the
first papal condemnation of Freemasonry in 1738), there had been nine Grand
Masters, six of them nobles. The first royal Grand Master was the Duke of
Cumberland, younger son of George II, who was installed in 1782, with an Acting
Grand Master, the Earl of Effingham as his proxy. In 1787 both the Prince of
Wales (the future George IV) and his brother William (the future William IV)
were initiated. The patronage by the Royal Family of the new secret society was
thenceforth assured. Queen Elizabeth II is the present Grand Patroness."
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